 understanding the seven golden rules of data. When you're working with data, you're doing reporting in Excel, you need to understand the seven golden rules. And in this video, I'm gonna show you the seven golden rules and just show you using a simple table why you must follow the seven golden rules for you to get the best at the maximum benefit from using Excel to do your reporting. So in this video, we're talking about the seven golden rules of data. Now, what do we mean by that? Now, before you use a pivot table, you have to have data. So in the previous video, you saw how to start off a pivot table, but here we're talking about data, right? So what are the seven golden rules of data? When you want to use things like pivot table or do any analysis in Excel, you need data. Now that data has to follow some very simple rules. So I'm gonna go through those rules for you. Please make sure you listen to them and understand why they're there. The very first rule is you have to have one row of headings, only one row of headings. That means you shouldn't have two rows of headings, something like this. Someone could say, hey, this is branch, right? And then this is code. So guess what? This means you have two rows of headings, not good. That's your broken rule one. So only one row of headings. Rule number two, no empty columns, no empty columns. So if you look at this, can you see, can you see how many empty columns do we have? Can you answer? If you said C and E, you're wrong. These are not empty columns, they're empty cells. The moment I delete this heading, yes, this is fully empty column, not a good thing. You should never have empty columns in your data at all. You shouldn't have that, right? Now having empty cells doesn't make sense because I mean, it's not good analysis, but it's not breaking the rule. That's rule number two. Obviously you know rule number three, no empty rows, right? Do you have empty rows? No, because this is not fully empty. If I delete this, this is now an empty row completely. Never have empty rows, that's rule number three. No empty rows, right? What's rule number four? Rule number four is that dates must be in a single column. So see these dates? They're correctly in a single column. So sometimes you have a table that has dates like this, right? You have Jan, and then maybe you can drag this a little bit to the right, you see? So these are dates to Jan, February, March. Now if you have a table like that, that is really a report. It's not necessarily the table that you need to do analysis with, all right? So yeah, you should not have that. You should have dates must be in a single column. So your Jan, February should be like this Jan, February, right? So yeah, so this table follows that rule. Rule is fine, rule number four. Dates must be in a single column. Then another rule states that every unique data type must have its own column. That's a bit difficult to understand. Every unique data type must have its own column. So you see this region, north, east, north, west and stuff like that. Probably we could have a data that doesn't have this, right? And what they have instead is they have here, they'll see north, east, right? And then they have a row, insert some rows and here they'll see north, west. And then another set of rows get inserted and here they'll see north, north, south, south or something, right? Now if you look at this column, this column has two types of data. It has location data and region data. So that's region data. So we said every unique data must have its own column. Now, unfortunately, this column has two types of data, location and region. Not good for analysis. You must ensure, if I rewind, you just undo, right? So you must ensure that your data has every unique data has its own column. So I guess that's rule five. Rule six, rule six says absolutely no totals or subtotals anywhere in your data. So you shouldn't have things like this. You shouldn't come here and have a sum, right? I shouldn't have a sum. I have my totals. You can see this is total. I have this total figure here. No, you shouldn't have that. Then have another set of totals here. You should not have totals or subtotals anywhere in your data. It's a complete sin. Remember, this is data rules, not report rules, right? Your report, of course, can have subtotals and subtotals, but your data should not, right? So that's rule number six. Rule number seven is you shouldn't have any obstruction anywhere around your data. What do we mean by that? Obstruction is somebody comes here and says, oh, great, this is nice. And somebody says, good. Now, this is comments, right? It's just next to my data. If I do a simple control A, control A is a trick to highlight your data, you'll see that it's taking that as part of your data. If you want that as part of your data, put a heading, call it comments, right? But if you call it comments, you can see that there are empty, empty comments here. So your analysis will not make sense. So if you do want to type some comments, what you do is insert an empty row, right? Insert an empty column, I mean, right? And then you can put your comments there, right? So that it's not obstructing your data. Your data is clean. And those are your seven golden rules. Yes, your rule number one, one row of headings. Yeah, only one row of headings. Rule number two, no empty columns. Rule number three, no empty rows. Rule number four, this must be in a single column, right? Rule number five, every unique data type must have its own column. Rule number six, we're saying that no totals or subtotals anywhere in your data. And rule number seven, no obstruction anywhere around your data, your data should be clean. Once you follow these seven golden rules, you'll be able to use Excel to do amazing things. So always, always, when you get your data, ask yourself, does it follow these seven golden rules? Great, we'll see you in the next video.